A secret network of tunnels and caverns connects the huts where Wa-Chagga (plural of "Chagga") live. Their conical huts, woven of thatch and sealed with mud, are a little like subway stations in the small settlements where they live on the lower slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The Chagga people have lived for centuries at the base of Kilimanjaro, yet they formerly had no desire to climb it, believing it was full of evil spirits. They've told old stories about people who climbed toward the silver top and never came back, or perhaps returned with their hands and feet deformed by frostbite.

Chagga Porters

The Chagga had no reason to understand the snow or know how to prepare for the cold, because very few of them had experienced either one. They may have shared a mountain with glaciers and a permanent snowcap, but they lived low enough on it to be in a different ecosystem. Theirs was a rainforest climate of warm days and long growing seasons, aided by rich terra cotta colored volcanic soil. The Chagga people historically have not had warm clothing. Even today, Chagga porters who assist climbing parties up the mountain tend to be scantily dressed by the standards of American mountaineering. They walk up into the cold regions bared armed and shod with simple footwear.

Originally Wa-Chagga lived, hunted and made war against each other as thirty separate chiefdoms. When game became too scarce to hunt, they cut down some of the trees on the lower slopes and divided their land into small plots to grow fruits and vegetables. Under colonial rule by the Germans and then later by the English in the early 1900s, they planted coffee. Today, the Chagga people wield significant political power in Tanzania because, like members of the Haya tribe, they are likely to have had more Western education than other Africans. Their involvement in coffee production and export business accounts for their influence as well.